"How's your next coloring book coming?"

One day last May I was at TCAF in Toronto sitting at the Drawn & Quarterly table signing copies of Poetry is Useless. Near the end of my allotted signing time the crowd had thinned and a distracted looking kid, maybe ten or eleven years old, approached and began absently turning pages in a copy of Big Questions. His mother, apparently desperate to interest her bored looking kid in something, anything at the show or in life noticed and her eyes brightened. "Ooh! It's a coloring book! You like to color! Should we get that for you?". I tried not to show it, but my soul crumpled slightly. Fortunately there's nothing like a parent's forced enthusiasm to dampen a child's interest in anything – he mumbled something inaudible, closed the book and they both wandered away.

Before my soul could completely uncrumple, my friend Jordan, who was at the table next door and had watched the whole exchange with interest piped up, grinning "Great coloring book you got there." he said. Later, back home in Minneapolis another friend got wind of the joke. "When's your next coloring book coming out?" Lots of laughs, all around. It became a thing.

Two months later I was at ComicCon in San Diego, signing again at the D+Q table, when Julia brought over a serious-looking, middle-aged Chinese gentleman and his interpreter, saying, among other things that he was a publisher in China, had been looking at my work and wanted to do a coloring book. My first thought was that Jordan or someone was playing a prank and I think I actually looked around. I'm sure some small mixture of annoyance and confusion probably flittered across my face, but I managed to have a short conversation with him and arranged to meet the next day for a drink to discuss the idea in more depth. But truly my initial thought was "How can I politely decline?".

The publisher is Ginkgo (in English) and it turned out that they make beautiful books. They've just started translating some literary graphic novels from the West (mostly France, but it looks like they are also picking up a few North American books – including Big Questions and Dogs and Water), and they were very fairly convincing. After turning the idea over in my head and thinking about what I might do I agreed. I'd had no idea that adult coloring books were a huge thing, and it turned out that several people I know use them, unbeknownst to me. It seemed like an interesting problem to play with, and Ginkgo was open to my ideas. The deal didn't get finalized until late January, and to get the 96 page book out in North America (D+Q is doing it over here) out in time for the holidays – done the way I want to do it – I have to basically do almost a page a day, with minimal chance for revision and none for preciousness. As I write this I'm just over half done, and am rather enjoying it. It's more drawing than I've ever done in a short period of time, but it's a genuinely interesting problem to work that fast, and has me pouring over books of plants and animals, visiting museums and conservatories for inspiration and looking at the world a little differently. I'll be posting pictures as I go for the next few weeks at FB and Instagram, and maybe a few more here as well, depending. Here's the cover and one more image:

The book is basically what it's title implies. I've done a bunch of drawings set in the Garden of Eden in the last few years, including the title/cover of God and the Devil at War in the Garden, and Adam and Eve Sneak Back into the Garden to Steal More Apples. The coloring book will basically be that version of Eden, populated with both real, fantastical – and long extinct animals, plants, and fungi, as well as various objects of human manufacture that might feel out of place. In a way I am picturing Adam and Eve's return in some imagined future after humans have disappeared and maybe even God has abandoned the place.

Adam and Eve Sneaking Back into the Garden of Eden to Steal More Apples

I haven't been drawing in my sketchbook much lately – as the dearth of recent blog posts will attest. Instead I've been preparing for a show I'm putting up at the Elmhurst Art Museum outside Chicago in a couple of weeks (opening June 15th). The show will mostly be drawings and includes the largest drawing I've probably ever done, a 5' x 8' leviathan with the above title, which can be seen, dimly, in the background of the photo on the left. In addition to the drawings I'll be showing one painting and a 28 foot long hand made accordian book called Rage of Poseidon. The book compiles a number of stories adapted from my sketchbooks, all stories of familiar gods and angels, including ones about Isaac and Abraham, the Devil, Leda and the Swan, and one where Jesus tries to pick up Aphrodite in a bar. The stories are coupled with silhouetted imagery, a technique I picked up a few years back as a quick way to create a slide show from the Poseidon story when Joe Meno had asked me to do a reading with him for the release of his book Demons in the Spring. Born of laziness the technique seemed to work unusually well with the subject matter. I ended up reading the pieces several more times including at stops on the book tour for Big Questions when it turned out that slide readings of comics – especially long silent sequences of sad and sickly birds crawling around in the grass exchanging curious looks – was a little awkward.

Making the accordian book has been as  epic a wrestling match as figuring out how to navigate a 5' x 8' drawing turned out to be – when one's line is as thin and airy as mine. Between the two I feel like I'm being ground into the mat and getting my head stapled by Mickey Rourke. How do you fold a 28 foot piece of paper into 48 separate pages evenly? How do you keep the glue at the hinges from warping the paper? How do you attach the damn thing to its cover? I have been repeatedly reminded why I started out in 1999 xeroxing drawings I didn't expect anyone to like on the cheapest paper I could find and stapling them together in a pile. That took an afternoon. In the process of making Rage of Poseidon I had to relearn how to screen print in order to make the covers (see above). I also found out that it's basically impossible to print accurately on both sides of a 44" x 84" piece of paper using an Epson 9880, but that it is possible to cut rolls of that paper into 9 inch wide strips on a chop saw... though in the end those rolls of paper turned out to be useless for other reasons.

To close out the post I'm attaching a few images of studies for the big drawing. The first two are of Adam and Eve and the general composition. These are followed by a number of studies of some australopithicenes who make their home in the garden. This little duo also show up in one of the stories in the accordian book that features Prometheus. I just can't get enough of that little guy with the cats. I'll be back in Elmhurst on August 17 to give an artist talk and do some readings from the book.

On Drawing

linesandmarks.com just put up some images as a teaser for an interview we're doing later this Summer, including a few newish things of mine, and a little preview of Poetry is Useless. If you haven't been over there, it's a beautiful new site about drawing. Their opening salvo also includes Albrecht Dürer, Julie Mehretu, Charles Burns and Marcel Dzama. Pretty fine company, and a really nice expansive way of looking at this art form which is so close to my heart. Sometimes I make comics, sometimes I do illustration, sometimes I make diagrams and sometimes I make 'paintings'... but everything I do is drawing. Drawing is everything.

If you click through to the interview preview page you get to move a little magnifying glass around on Adam and Eve Sneaking Back into the Garden to Steal More Apples. Most of my work is probably ripping off Burns a little bit, but here's a painting I did several years back inspired directly by Dürer's various takes on St Jerome and the Lion (which also might be the first time I depicted Adam and Eve – that's them by the tree).

Comic Tragics Show

Just got a clutch of photos from the Comic Tragics show at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. From the looks of it they did an amazing job framing and matting everything I sent. Just one drawing alone is seven feet wide and almost five feet tall. It looks like an amazing show. The big drawing is Adam and Eve Sneaking Back into the Garden to Steal More Apples. Also shown here are a large rootball drawing, the originals from Me and the Universe, original art for  posters I did for both Autoptic and the second Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, a bunch of pages from Dogs and Water, The End, Big Questions and Don't Go Where I Can't Follow, sketchbooks with some early versions of pieces from The End, a one-of-a-kind accordion book, Captain America Resting and a drawing of a car engine. Huge thanks to Robert Cook and to everyone who mounted the show.

Landscapes and Smoke

Below are an image from and the postcard for a show I am doing at Littlebird Gallery in L.A., called Landscapes and Smoke. It opens on December 6th and features a bunch of big drawings, a few gouache paintings and a few covers from Big Questions. Included are Batman, Captain America, The Archangel Gabriel, Adam and Eve and an upside down tree. Oh, and Bison Man. If you're around you should come check it out.

Would there be cute pugs peeing on shrubbery in the Garden of Eden?

Friday morning I'm flying to San Francisco to go skateboarding. Also for APE. At which, Sunday at 1:30 in the afternoon, I'm going to read a bit from Rage of Poseidon and talk a little about why I'm always stealing characters from other people's stories. Jesus, Hercules, Captain America... the guy with the cow head who lives in the maze and eats people who come to visit him, stuff like that. The list is just endless. Which, like, why don't I just come up with my own shit for once? Jeez. Here's Prometheus from Rage of Poseidon:

So, I'll be talking about the new book, but also about a bunch of other images and stories of mine where old situations and characters have shown up in my work and why. Below are a few examples of stuff I might talk about. In order: Hercules Ascending to Olympus, Adam and Eve Sneaking Back into the Garden of Eden to Steal More Apples (detail) and Last Remnant after the End of the World (Tree of Knowledge)

Five Days Left

Last week most of the images in the show at Littlebird, Landscapes and Smoke, were posted on the gallery site. Here is the one lone image that was not. It's called Adam and Eve and the Lion of St. Jerome, and is partly inspired by all the St. Jerome images of Albrecht Durer.

The show comes down next Thursday.